Producing and learning to produce utterances in social interaction

Developmental research on first and second language acquisition is mainly concerned with cognitive, linguistic or pragmatic aspects of individual speech production treated separately and based on the tenets of separate disciplines or approaches (psycholinguistics, psychology of language, constructivism, conversation analysis). However, some studies try to integrate questions of language acquisition into the much broader context of social interaction in general. This paper argues in favour of such integration, taking a conversationalist perspective on speech and discourse production in social — face-to-face — interaction. In particular, it argues for the systematic integration of all kinds of body movements (traditionally called gestures) and prosody into the analysis of empirical data as a fundamental basis for the development of an interactional grammar and its study in an acquisitional research framework.